What causes people to give false confessions?

Recent cases throw spotlight on police interrogation techniques

July 11, 2010|By Lisa Black and Steve Mills, Tribune reporters

After 14 hours of interrogation in a small, windowless room, Kevin Fox simply gave up. He knew he hadn't sexually assaulted or murdered his 3-year-old daughter, but police had rejected his requests for a lawyer and told him they would arrange for inmates to rape him in jail, according to court records.

The distraught father later testified that detectives also screamed at him, showed him a picture of his daughter, bound and gagged with duct tape, and told him that his wife was planning to divorce him, the records show.

Fox finally agreed to a detective's hypothetical account of how his daughter, Riley, died in an accident, thinking investigators would realize that the phony details didn't match up with the evidence, his lawyer said. Instead, he remained in Will County jail for 8 months, released only after DNA evidence excluded him as a suspect. In May, another man was charged with the crime.

What could be a similar story is now unfolding in Lake County, where Jerry Hobbs III, 39, is accused of murdering his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend. Hobbs, who had a criminal record, has been in jail five years, in large part because of a confession that emerged after hours of high-pressure interrogation. Prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty in his October trial, even though his DNA did not match semen found on his daughter's body.

Authorities recently matched the DNA with another man accused of rape and robbery in Arlington, Va., offering Hobbs a chance at exoneration and once again raising the possibility that police coerced a suspect to falsely confess.

Both cases raise a question: Why would anyone confess to such horrific crimes — especially involving their own child or loved one — if they didn't commit them? Seemingly unfathomable, it happens far more often than most people believe, experts say.

"The interrogation itself is stressful enough to get innocent people to confess," said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "But add to that a layer of grief and shock and perhaps even some guilt — 'I should have been there' — and then that the parent is trying like hell to be cooperative because they want the murder of their child solved."

Trauma, lack of sleep and highly manipulative interrogation techniques are a few factors that can cause the most level-headed people to falsely confess to a crime — even one as heinous as a child's murder, according to experts. Researchers believe that false confessions lead to about 25 percent of wrongful convictions, a statistic underscored by the increasingly sophisticated use of DNA evidence.

Over the past two decades, 254 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence, including 17 who were on death row, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic based at Yeshiva University in New York.

"We know that for certain kinds of people, particularly those with mental illness and mental deficiencies, but other people as well, the psychological intensity of an interrogation can prove absolutely as torturous as physical pain," said Lawrence Marshall, a Stanford University law professor who co-founded Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Confessions carry powerful weight with juries, and, as shown in the Hobbs case, they also strongly influence authorities. In 2008, Lake County Judge Fred Foreman agreed with prosecutors that Hobbs should remain imprisoned without bail, despite the revelation that his DNA did not match the semen found on his daughter's body.

Prosecutors suggested that Hobbs' daughter Laura had gotten the DNA in her body because she was found in a wooded area where people apparently go to have sex — in spite of the fact she was fully clothed.

Lake County prosecutors have not said if they have ruled out Hobbs as a participant in the crime, but they announced they're renewing their investigation in light of the DNA evidence.

In the Fox case, the Will County Sheriff's Department plans to hire an outside firm to evaluate its procedures and determine if they need to be changed.

"Obviously, there were some things that went wrong in this investigation," the sheriff's spokesman, Pat Barry, said. "We are in the process now of vetting a couple of firms … that will come in and review the Fox case for us."

Confessions that are not backed up with corroborating evidence should be viewed as suspect, Marshall said.

"I think what we are seeing right now is there has become an overdependence on confessions," said Marshall, who is appealing the case of Juan Rivera of Waukegan, who in May 2009 was convicted for the third time of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl despite DNA evidence that excluded him. Lake County prosecutors suggested the girl was sexually active to undercut the DNA.